MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Cognitive rules and culture
But the suggestion is made that perhaps the merger has resulted in
attitudes changing:-
Certainly in the UCW, I would have thought, management is
bollocks was a fairly commonly held view. It's probably breaking
down a little bit. I think certainly at senior level we have
recognised that an organisation with a turnover of whatever it is,
£20 or £30 million needs to be managed. I think they realise
now that trying to merge two organisations needs to be
managed. It wasn't going to happen by a process of osmosis or
whatever so I think you would find more officers who are more
open to listening to management is not quite bollocks thesis,
anyway and that there is something to be learned. (Interviewee
F)
It has been suggested that one of the ways of differentiating
management in trade unions from management in industries in which
unions operate is to use much more trade union specific language, and
this was succinctly put in one interview:-
If it is a managerial term then we will use another term.
(Interviewee B)
The cognitive processes of CWU managers will have been affected
also by their perceptions of any constraints bearing on them in their
managerial roles. Frequently mentioned are personnel issues:-
We had difficulty dealing with discipline cases because we were
a union. Sometimes you had people who were kamikaze
employees who think the union will never take them to a tribunal
-- that if they are bad employees they will get a deal.
(Interviewee A)
I don't say this lightly and I respect that this is in confidence and
I don't want to sound the wrong way but we don't sack
anybody…………….I do not want to sack people. I only want to
say to people, hold on, we are paying you and it is your
responsibility in that job to service those members who are
paying your wages. That is the game. If you do not want to play
the game, then fine. Just let me know. But we want you to. But
we do need to have in place processes now, given the financial
state of the union, we need to have in place processes for all of
the people who are involved. There has always been a
reluctance. "Oh we can't do that, we are a trade union." But we
are an employer as well. (Interviewee N)
Linked to that is the fact that there are no procedures in place for
setting standards or dealing with performance:-
I think, though, that the disciplinary code, as I suppose it should
be, is largely seen as a last resort. It isn't the best method of
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